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On Aug 3, 2012, a giant sinkhole opened up when a Texas Brine salt mine collapsed in Bayou Corne, LA. Locals knew something was not right months before when they began to find natural gas bubbling up in the swamp. Texas Brine had alerted state agencies there might be a problem after they drilled too close to the mine edge years before, but no one let the residents know. A mandatory evacuation order was issued, but many residents have not moved. The hole continues to grow. Geophysicists are conducting high tech tests to come up with a model of what the mine looks like now so they might be able to predict what will happen next. How toxic and dangerous is Bayou Corne now? It depends whom you listen to. Experts will be battling that out in court. Texas Brine has not offered to buy the endangered properties. Homeowners get a weekly $850 compensation check, which Texas Brine is required to pay by law since all signs point to them being responsible. People’s lives are in limbo. This once peaceful paradise is now a place of nightmares where flare vents burning 24 hours a day and the stench of crude oil fills the air whenever the sinkhole burps.

The only winners were the forces the coalition of the willing sought to defeat, writes David Gardner

Iraq remains the subject of visceral polemic 10 years after George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their misbegotten and mendaciously sold war of choice to remove Saddam Hussein and, by their lights, reshape the Middle East. The invasion and occupation of Iraq unlocked forces with long-term consequences. Given the staggering obtuseness that marked the entire enterprise one cannot be sure, but one assumes few of them were intended by its Anglo-American artificers.

The devastation visited upon a country already made prostrate by wars, sanctions and tyranny did not so much shock and awe as offer a pitilessly public spectacle of the limits to US power (Britain’s role as spear-carrier was a sideshow).

No one is blind to the military might the US possesses in unique abundance. But after Iraq there are real doubts – seemingly in America as well as the wider world – about its ability to use this power competently to shape intractable events (current agonising over whether to arm Syrian rebels comes to mind). When future historians date the end of the brief, post-cold war, unipolar moment, they will surely pinpoint Iraq.

As scrutiny and debate over the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) by the American military increased last month, the Air Force reversed a policy of sharing the number of airstrikes launched from RPAs in Afghanistan and quietly scrubbed those statistics from previous releases kept on their website.

Last October, Air Force Central Command started tallying weapons releases from RPAs, broken down into monthly updates. At the time, AFCENT spokeswoman Capt. Kim Bender said the numbers would be put out every month as part of a service effort to “provide more detailed information on RPA ops in Afghanistan.”

The Air Force maintained that policy for the statistics reports for November, December and January. But the February numbers, released March 7, contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had previously been.

Hours after CIA Director John Brennan took the oath of office—behind closed doors, far away from the press, perhaps befitting his status as America's top spy—the White House took pains to emphasize the symbolism of the ceremony.

“There's one piece of this that I wanted to note for you,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at their daily briefing. “Director Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington's personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787.”

Earnest said Brennan had asked for a document from the National Archives that would demonstrate the U.S. is a nation of laws.

"Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest said.

The Constitution itself went into effect in 1789. But troublemaking blogger Marcy Wheeler points out that what was missing from the Constitution in 1787 is also quite symbolic: The Bill of Rights, which did not officially go into effect until December 1791 after ratification by states. (Caution: Marcy's post has some strong language.)

That means: No freedom of speech and of the press, no right to bear arms, no Fourth Amendment ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and no right to a jury trial.

Lawyers acting for "blade runner" Oscar Pistorius, accused of shooting dead his girlfriend, want his bail conditions relaxed and passports returned so he can travel overseas, South African media reported on Friday.

Pistorius, charged with the Valentine's Day murder of his Reeva Steenkamp, 29, was released on strict bail conditions two weeks ago. He was ordered to pay a bond of 1 million rand ($110,000), hand over his passports and forbidden from returning to his house, the scene of the crime.

Thousands of Egyptians packed the streets of the Suez Canal city of Port Said on Friday in protest at the deaths of local people in clashes with police and before a court decision in a contentious football riot case.

Violence has flared in Port Said since January, with protests over death sentences given to 21 local people in connection with a stadium riot in which more than 70 died.

Italian comic-turned-activist Beppe Grillo has blazed a trail for populist political movements around Europe by taking his Five Star Movement (M5S) from obscurity to become Italy's largest party in its first general election campaign.

Grillo's stunning success in turning a fringe protest group into a national force while refusing to be interviewed on television or debate with mainstream politicians may be studied by political scientists and campaign operatives for years.

Populists hostile to the euro or to immigration have ridden a wave of anger over austerity, recession and unemployment to make inroads from the Netherlands to France, Finland and Greece since the financial crisis began in 2008.

Germany and a handful of EU countries have blocked Bulgaria and Romania from joining the Schengen Area of border-free travel. Editorialists at the Germany's left-leaning dailies are calling the move an election-year ploy on the part of conservatives in Berlin.

Bulgaria and Romania have been members of the European Union since 2007, but their accession into the Schengen Area of passport-free travel has once again been delayed over concerns in Berlin.

"The time isn't right," German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said in Brussels on Thursday.

President Barack Obama’s half-brother, Abong’o Malik Obama, won’t be the second member of his family to launch a political career. Mr. Obama was defeated in his bid to be governor of Kenya’s Siaya County this week by what seems to have been a very large margin.

Mr. Obama is the eldest child of President Obama’s father. They have different mothers. Mr. Obama served as the best man at the president’s wedding to Michelle Obama in 1992.

Israeli police fired stun grenades to disperse Palestinian worshippers who had thrown rocks and firebombs at them after Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, police said.

Dozens of officers entered the politically sensitive area, one of Islam's holiest sites to break up several hundred protesters.

A number of policemen were lightly hurt, a police spokesman said, and Palestinian media said at least 15 protesters were injured.

Russia will "absolutely not" tell Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down to end the civil war and make way for a political transition, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in comments published on Friday.

The remarks to the BBC were a reiteration of Moscow's position that Assad's exit must not be a precondition for a negotiated solution to the two-year-old conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people.

On December 14th 2012, members of the US Intelligence Information Center launched a joint task force between several different experts including college professors, private investigators, and confidential law enforcement sources to examine allegations surrounding the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. These allegations included the possibility of actors that we’re deployed to play key roles including some of the victims and their families. Those who have alleged such a fraud have voiced their opinion that this massacre was part of a “full-scale exercise” for the purpose of swaying public opinion towards increased gun control.

As part of this investigation, the following articles of evidence were recovered and analyzed:

1. A large family album of approximately 1200 photos containing members of the Greenberg, Kaplan, Blumberg, and Katzenberg families. This album was posted publicly by members of the before mentioned families and was archived prior to its removal from the internet.
2. A family album of approximately 600 photos containing members of the Parker family.

Elisa Lam update: New speculation regarding a missing Canadian tourist's death is focusing on the possibility that she was murdered by a musician who lived in Cecil Hotel. In fact, a Chinese news source claims that Elisa might have had a crush on the musician, who is being called "Morbid." This is certainly a new twist on a case that still has many people sick to their stomachs.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees claim that inmates at the high security facility are starving themselves to death, refusing to sleep in their cells and have been engaged for weeks in widespread protests.

Attorneys for the terror detainees allege that guards at the prison camp on the island of Cuba 'desecrated' a Quaran, which sparked February's hunger protest and claim that conditions have deteriorated to the 'darkest days under Bush'

The alleged troubles comes as U.S. military officials confirmed on Thursday that a guard at the U.S. owned facility fired a 'non-lethal' plastic bullet round to disperse prisoners, hitting an inmate - after one of them tried to climb a fence and others threw rocks at one guard tower.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday warned state and local health officials about potential infections from a deadly virus previously unseen in humans that has now sickened 14 people and killed 8.

Most of the infections have occurred in the Middle East, but a new analysis of three confirmed infections in Britain suggests the virus can pass from person to person rather than from animal to humans, the CDC said in its Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report on Thursday.

The virus is a coronavirus, part of the same family of viruses as the common cold and the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that first emerged in Asia in 2003. The new virus is not the same as SARS, but like the SARS virus, it is similar to those found in bats.

Arab states are free to offer military support to rebels fighting the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if they wish, a final statement of Arab League ministers said on Wednesday.

Previously the League had stressed that the Syrian opposition and rebels should be supported by humanitarian and diplomatic means.

However, a final statement issued at the end of a meeting of the ministers in Cairo said they had "stressed the right of each state according to its wishes to offer all types of self defense, including military, to support the resilience of the Syrian people and the Free (Syrian) Army."

North Korea's blood-curdling war threats are often dismissed as the kind of over-the-top rhetoric the world expects from the reclusive and eccentric leadership in Pyongyang, now in its third generation under Kim Jong-un.

But while the latest threat to launch a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" on the United States is believed by experts to be beyond North Korea's technical capacities, and would be suicidal, history shows there can be bite behind Pyongyang's bark.

"This kind of extreme rhetoric has not been unusual for this regime, unfortunately," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Thursday, adding the United States could defend itself and allies Japan and South Korea in any event.

North Korea has plenty of military firepower even if its threat this week of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States is a hollow one, with South Korea most at risk from the isolated regime's artillery and rockets.

Japan, separated by less than 1,000 km (625 miles) of water and a frequent target of North Korea's ire, is also in easy range of Pyongyang's short- and mid-range missiles.

French forces searching for al Qaeda-linked militants in the hidden valleys of the remote north of Mali are now deep in the Islamists' sanctuary, France's defense minister said on Friday.

A day after a visit to Mali, Jean-Yves Le Drian said the current phase of the eight-week-old French-led offensive was the hardest, as it required winkling the Islamist fighters out of entrenched positions in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.

French soldiers killed about 15 militants this week after discovering a small army of jihadists in the Ametetai valley.

A student in Indiana prompted an immediate internet backlash after posting a racist video listing the ten reasons why he would not want to be Asian.

In an apparent effort to deflect the criticism that he knew would come, the video was titled 'Why I'd Hate To Be Asian (Totally Not Racist), but that didn't stop Sam Hendrickson from being blasted by commentors for his offensive remarks.